As part of our monumental 75th anniversary this year, we recently hosted a press event with Lisa Bronner and Dr. Gero Leson, Head of Special Ops at Dr. Bronner’s around what our HEAL EARTH! Campaign champions.
Asking ourselves back in 2003, “Where the hell do our ingredients come from?”, we began the journey of setting up our own global projects, to make organic and fair trade coconut oil to ensure the standards we wanted – socially and environmentally – were being met.
At the event, Dr Gero Leson goes into this discussion a little more, so take a read of what he said here:
Dr Gero Leson, Head of Special Ops at Dr. Bronner’s
“If you’ve been following us for a while, I guess by now you can tell that that Dr. Bronner’s isn’t your standard company.
There’s a certain skepticism of corporate pronouncements, you’ve heard all the slogans, so our brands cosmic principles to some cynics may just be words, right?
What I always enjoy about my presentation on Dr. Bronner’s supply chains and the ingredients we use in the products, is to show that in fact, this is a great exemplification of the Cosmic Principles particularly three of them, which are; be fair to suppliers, treat employees like family, and then treat earth like home. But there’s a story to it.
You can tell this whole family is just one big story that involves a whole bunch of characters. And two of the actors are brothers Mike Bronner and David Bronner. In around 2003, David the visionary, started thinking, “where the hell do our ingredients come from right now?” And nobody knew.
Dr. Bronner’s soaps are made largely from oils; coconut oil, olive oil and palm oil, and then we add a good shot of an essential oil. This is where the scents comes from. The recipes all are really simple.
So the first idea, was that we should just buy organic because then the workers in the coconut plantations will not be exposed to pesticide herbicides. That at the time was a big concern in the United States. We just had our own organic standards here so exposure to pesticide was an issue. From then, the company started buying organic coconut oil, palm and olive oil, which had become available and certified to US standards.
After a year of doing this, the company realised that firstly this was pretty expensive, and secondly we still have no idea as to what the working conditions were like for the people on the ground. Organic is silent, right? It just says essentially there’s no herbicides and fertilizer being used, but it doesn’t say anything on social conditions. And this is where I came in.
I knew David Bronner through our research on the use of industrial hemp in products. I had been working in Sri Lanka on a development project, and David kept bugging me to look for organic and fair trade coconut oil. He had thought that the fair-trade standards would provide you with the kind of transparency and insights into your supply chain which it didn’t, and with his grandfather’s vision always in the back of his mind, he wanted to make sure that the people helping create his families soaps were paid fairly, not tortured on the ground, and not exposed to dangerous pesticides and so on. The truth was that at the time, there were no standards, at least not for oils. There was fair rate coffee at the time and cocoa and sugar, and this was about it. Now there is the Fair Trade Foundation and the International Certification Organization for Fair Trade Standards which monitors this, but at the time there was nothing.
And this shows you that Dr. Bonner’s is somewhat an unusual company. This is how the idea to build our own projects came about. Projects that would make organic and fair trade coconut oil first, and it sounds a little crazy, but that became my job in 2005, and I’ve had the pleasure and the headache to implement and lead this program ever since. So over the last 12, what, 15 some years we built this. I always refer to it as an empire, a little empire, but it’s essentially a group, a network of projects that are organic and fair trade. Here’s the three project that we took from organic through Fair Trade to regenerative over the last almost 20 years now
- Serendipol, Sri Lanka
- Pavitramanthe, India
- Serendipalm, Ghana.
Now, these three projects we actually own, we invested in those, we built those projects, we recruited farmers and we converted them to organic. We built factories, we built a staff and team and then became involved in communities. We don’t just buy from these projects only, we actually build those and have operational responsibility. Something similar is true for other projects.
There’s Pavitramanthe in India, which supplies our mint oils. And then there is cane down in Ivory Coast, which supplies the majority of the cocoa beans we now use. So here’s where we buy our ingredients. Now, the vast majority of these projects are Fair Trade certified, but you’ll also see that some of them carry this little logo of the Regenerative Organic Alliance and this goes beyond organic. Its about trying to revert some of the damage that has been caused by decades of rather insensitive use of chemicals on the soil and the destruction essentially of organic matter. And that – in addition to organic and fair trade standards – became our battle cry around 2015, when we realised there’s more we can actually do in our projects, not just for people but for the Earth too.
Dr. Bronner’s is a family business committed to honouring the vision of our founder Dr. E.H. Bronner by making socially and environmentally responsible products of the highest quality, and by dedicating our profits to helping make a better world. “All-One!”